The best facts I heard this year
2024-12-27 21:26 GMT
I love reading other people’s annual fact lists, so I decided to shamelessly steal the idea. These are the best facts I heard this year, the best on the day that I heard it (though it might not have been a recently created fact). So yes, there were some really competitive days where some other really good facts lost and so are lost to me, as well as long stretches where no fact passed muster.
January 13. The bannister of the grand staircase in the Royal Opera House was built for Queen Victoria’s height. via B. I couldn’t find a source for exactly this online—perhaps they tell you on the tour?
January 14. 80 percent of all travel decisions are made by women. via MR.
January 19. The USDA definition of a hot dog requires that they be comminuted (reduced to minute particles), semisolid products made from one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle from livestock. Particles too big, not a hot dog. via J.
January 23. Font design studios are called “foundries.” via J.
February 2. Trump’s deportation plans would hit the Irish especially hard. via R.
February 4. Sour Patch Kids are banned in Europe from 2022 because of an additive the FDA thinks is low risk, but the European Commission thinks it might cause DNA damage. via R.
February 16. British Airways once disguised a passenger who died in-flight with sunglasses and a vodka tonic. via J.
March 9. Whales don’t get cancer because they’re so big that their cancers get cancer first. via C.
March 15. The internet helped expose the Astros sign-stealing scandal where players would bang on a trash can to tell the batter what kind of pitch was coming next. via S.
March 27. The Barbican Steinway uses a personal, perfectly sized, direct-to-destination elevator to get on and off the stage. Personal eyewitness at The Death of Stalin in concert.
April 15. After World War II, Warsaw’s Old Town was rebuilt with the help of 18th century paintings, and so was rebuilt with its inaccuracies. via N.
April 23. 96% of books sell less than a thousand copies. via MR.
April 25. A linear layer without activations is still nonlinear, because floating point representations introduce a nonlinearity. via J.
May 9. Time is the most used noun in the English language. And there is no clock on Earth that gives the “correct” time. via S.
May 20. A bunch of Portland, Maine facts while I was visiting, all too good to choose one. Portland has the most restaurants per capita in America. The 9/11 attackers chose Portland to take off from because the security was more lax. They stayed in a nearby Comfort Inn, that to this day hangs a plaque commemorating that fact. (Okay this next one is Vinalhaven, not Portland.) A new guy moved to Vinalhaven, a lobstering island, allegedly won a lobstering job over another guy, who also had a daughter with a cousin of the second guy’s wife, and so the second guy killed the first guy with an axe, but allegedly in self defense, and nobody was charged. “We call you, you come out, nothing fucking happens. That is why vigilantes and Vinalhaven island justice is the way we do shit.” All via M.
May 31. We might imagine the forbidden fruit as an apple because of a typo. In Latin, the words for “evil” and “apple” are both “malum,” so a scribe could easily have copied “the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” (“boni et mali”) with apples. Michelangelo depicts the fruit as a fig. via J.
June 8. “About a year later, an Italian journalist leaked to the US Embassy in Rome a purported Nigerien government document detailing the purchase. Fingar showed the document to an INR analyst who had served as a foreign service officer in Niger. “He looked at the putative document and he says, ‘That’s a forgery. It’s an obvious forgery,’” Fingar says. “How do you know it’s an obvious forgery? ‘In Niger, when they sign, the line is on a diagonal. This is horizontal. It’s obviously not an official document.’”” via V.
June 9. A recent Chinese online phrase is, 古希腊掌管XX的神, meaning, the Ancient Greek god of XX, usually used to refer to someone if they are specifically good at something. via C.
June 10. The Allies wanted to drop bandit problems on German scientists to distract them during the war. via S.
June 14. Restaurant dishwashers take two minutes. via C.
June 15. In 2022 more of the top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from China than from America. via The Economist.
June 16. John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” might not be about West Virginia, but about the western part of Virginia. via N.
June 20. Airlines: The infant must be under 2 years of age for the duration of the flight. If they turn 2 during a flight, they will need their own seat for the remainder of the flight. via X.
June 21. “The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.” via The Guardian.
June 22. Honduras’s best coffee is sent to Asia, second best to Europe, and last best to America. Anecdata via S.
June 29. Bell Labs designed telephone numpads for random numbers and calculator numpads for real-life data. via S.
July 22. One of the most diversified economies in the country, only 13% of Illinois’ GDP comes from a single industry at the state level. via M.
August 4. Steam trains used to replenish their water supply while in motion by lowering a scoop in a trough. via E.
August 18. “When Shostakovich came to London for the British premiere of his 15th symphony, he saw [Jesus Christ Superstar] two nights running and confessed to Julian Lloyd Webber that, but for Stalin, he might have written in such a way himself. He loved it.” via The Guardian.
August 19. In the UK, parties are legally bound as soon as the letter accepting the offer is posted, regardless of whether the letter is later received. Apparently this is because the Royal Mail is so slow and unreliable. via J. Bonus American mail facts here.
August 26. IndiGo, the airline they founded in 2006, is now India’s largest, with over 60% of the domestic market by passenger volume. By comparison, America’s top four airlines together have 69% of its market. via The Economist.
August 27. When the National Gallery renovated the Sainsbury Wing, it found a note from Lord Sainsbury: IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS NOTE YOU MUST BE ENGAGED IN DEMOLISHING ONE OF THE FALSE COLUMNS THAT HAVE BEEN PLACED IN THE FOYER OF THE SAINSBURY WING OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY. I BELIEVE THAT THE FALSE COLUMNS ARE A MISTAKE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THAT WE WOULD LIVE TO REGRET OUR ACCEPTING THIS DETAIL OF HIS DESIGN. LET IT BE KNOWN THAT ONE OF THE DONORS OF THIS BUILDING IS ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTED THAT YOUR GENERATION HAS DECIDED TO DISPENSE WITH THE UNNECESSARY COLUMNS. via M.
September 5. The equestrian long jump was a one-time Olympic event, and the Olympic record is 6.1 meters. via G.
September 15. The qipao literally means “banner gown,” after the Manchu Eight Banners of the Qing dynasty. Women wanted a one-piece robe to match men (before that women wore two-piece robes), and the sleeves were removed later. via E.
September 18. “The US negotiators [to chip sanctions] include officials from the commerce department and National Security Council. One person familiar with the talks said Gina Raimondo, commerce secretary, and Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, were being deployed in a “bad cop, very bad cop” approach.” via A.
September 20. French unions have special barbecues that fit on tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march. via S.
September 21. About the existence of Government cheese: Government cheese is a commodity cheese that was controlled by the US federal government from World War II to the early 1980s. via J.
September 22. The New Haven Independent receives approximately seventy thousand unique visitors each month, half of the city’s population of one hundred forty thousand. via T.
September 25. Michelin-starred restaurants are more likely to close. via The Economist.
September 29. “Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.” via A.
October 3. For the entire value of Aerojet’s $2.1b contract, SpaceX can launch 150 Falcons, which is roughly two years worth of launches at 2024 flight rates. via C.
October 4. “Last year 92% of Kweichow Moutai’s nearly 150bn yuan ($21bn) in sales was pure gross profit. For Diageo the figure was 60%. In terms of operating margin, Nongfu (at 33%) bests digital titans like Alphabet, Google’s parent company (31%), and Tencent, China’s most valuable firm (30%), let alone rival water-pedlars such as Danone, owner of Evian (13%).” via The Economist.
October 5. Atoms cannot survive intact in any collision whose relative speed is comparable to or faster than 0.00005 c—about 10 miles (15 km) per second. via MR.
October 6. “Trial by boiling water was not as bad as it sounded. In medieval Europe, those accused of grave crimes might be ordered to plunge an arm into a bubbling cauldron to retrieve an object. If they were scalded, that was God’s way of revealing their guilt. The chance of acquittal would seem to be zero, but 60% of those who underwent this ordeal got off. How come? The answer is that defendants believed in divine judgment. The guilty, convinced that God knew all, confessed to avoid the extra punishment of scalding. The innocent assumed they would be acquitted, so they refused to confess. The priests who prepared the cauldron knew this, and did not want to undermine their own authority by condemning someone who might later prove innocent. So they did not heat the water as much as they pretended to.” via The Economist.
October 7. The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. via B.
October 15. While English has few words of Chinese origin, “ketchup” is probably one of them. via S.
October 19. Most designer brands don’t have in-house perfumers. via V. Should I have already known this?
October 22. “Yale’s Beinecke Library, already stocked with more inventory than it can catalogue, recently limited its curators to eight hundred linear feet of new material a year, two-thirds of its usual intake.” via The New Yorker.
October 28. The Giant African land snail was introduced on the South Pacific Islands as a food reserve for the American military during World War II, but they escaped. So the government brought in the carnivorous rosy wolfsnail to each the original snails, but they instead caused the extinction of the native snail within a decade. via L.
October 29. Each year, three galaxies fall out of the universe and are lost forever from our vantage point as everything gets farther apart. via T.
November 1. The average age of a new fellow of the Royal Society is now roughly 50% higher than the average age of the people who founded it. via J.
November 2. The East India Company is still going as a fine foods and lifestyle shop. via H.
November 3. Israel’s biggest export by value is diamonds. via Tradle.
November 5. Where different newsrooms got their dinner on election night. Lots of pizza, and The Economist has whiskey. via B.
November 13. In lots of incidents in China precisely 35 people die, and one theory is that if 36 or more people die it counts as a major incident which causes leadership to get fired over it. via J.
November 18. Peru is the world’s biggest consumer of panettone, surpassing Italy, with 1.3 kg of panettone eaten per person per year. via K.
November 22. One of the first uses of superglue was to stop soldiers from bleeding out. via C.
November 25. 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through Virginia. via S.
November 29. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli spent much of his career cataloging long “canals” on the surface of Mars. These turned out later to be the artifacts of then underpowered telescopes. via T.
December 3. The laborers who built the pyramids might have been skilled artisans, not slaves. via C.
December 7. Gaudí designed the Sagrada Família upside down. via A.
December 8. “My friend Paul’s mother was the daughter of Canadian missionaries, and she spent her childhood in Sichuan. During the upheavals of early Republican China, she and her family made occasional trips back to Canada, and had to brave pirates on their way down the Yangtze River to Shanghai. Apparently, the joke was that the pirates, lurking in the backwaters, sent spies to watch the passengers on board as they dined, because observing how an individual ate their fish would give them a good idea of the kind of ransom they might fetch. Anyone who preferred the grapplesome area around the head showed the exquisite taste of the upper classes and was certainly worth kidnapping. Those who favoured the muscly flesh near the tail of the fish might fetch a 800d price, while anyone who ate their fish willy-nilly, careless of the distinctions of texture, might as well be tossed overboard.” via F.
December 9. When Barshu, arguably the first premium Sichuan restaurant in London, opened, they consulted Fuschia Dunlop to choose and translate the menu. The term “mapo tofu” wasn’t known back then—that’s why it was called, and is still called, “Pock-marked old woman’s beancurd with minced pork.” Very confusing for people! In conversation via F.
December 11. This is not the day I learned this fact, but the day I get to share it: it’s harder for computer control AI like Claude and Mariner to do tasks in Europe than in America because sometimes they fail to click out of GDPR cookie banners. Source: my personal testing.
December 13. African savannah elephants and common marmoset monkeys have names for each other. via N.
December 23. There’s a London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona. via L.
December 24. This fact might not be true, but we’ll let it slide since it’s Christmas. A member of parliament, Thomas Massey-Massey, was introducing a motion to change the name of Christmas to Christ-tide, on the grounds that mass is a Catholic festival, inappropriate to a Protestant country. Не was interrupted by a member opposite who asked him how he would like to be called “Thotide Tidey-Tidey.” The bill was forgotten in the uproar. via J.
My most hearty congratulations to one J. for winning The Best Fact Zhengdong Has Heard Today Award more times than any of my other friends did this year. Bravo!